Covid-19 has rocked women’s sport but its future remains bright

Hope and determination abound throughout professional women’s sport despite the profound challenges brought by the coronavirus pandemic

The images come from a different time and place: before the sporting world became submerged in sepia and nostalgia, before the great stasis began. Dina Asher-Smith running a bend so geometrically perfect it could have been drawn by a compass before rocketing to the first global sprint title won by a British woman. The MCG swollen with a record 86,174 crowd watching Australia’s cricketers win the Women’s T20 World Cup. England’s Lionesses attracting so many converts and casuals to their cause that unheard of numbers – 11.8m people, in fact – tune in for their World Cup semi-final against the USA.

In truth the most striking sporting photograph of the past 12 months – that of Megan Rapinoe with her arms wide and chin regally tilted in celebration – felt like a metaphor for women’s sport itself: standing tall, oozing attitude, ready to take the fight to all-comers. No wonder that throughout 2019 and early 2020 there was a sense of tectonic plates being shifted, and prejudices being shattered. But then came the Covid-19 pandemic. And with it a clawing fear that what had been made could be rapidly unmade.

Continue reading…